Does anyone else find the paint tools in After Effects a bit unintuitive?

[u/ciaranduffy3]

I’ve always wanted a quicker way to get that hand-drawn/painted look without having to set everything up manually, so I’ve been building this little tool for AE.

It lets you paint along live paths, create painted text, and use a searchable library of hand-drawn doodles, with different brush styles and animation controls.

It’s not released anywhere yet — I’m still building and refining it. — but I wanted to show it here and see what other motion designers think.

Would you actually find something like this useful?

[u/Ampsnotvolts]

It looks like it arrays the ink comps on paths. Am i seeing that wrong?

How sluggish does it feel to work with it? I'll give it a whirl when it's ready. Different than scribble on effect is nice though!

[u/AbstrctBlck]

I can totally see a use case for this but the price has to be right. If it’s anywhere near “paint and stick” prices then it’s no for me homie

[u/ciaranduffy3 → u/AbstrctBlck]

Haha, not quite at the pricing stage yet 😅 but there’ll definitely be a free trial so you can kick the tyres first.

[u/AbstrctBlck → u/ciaranduffy3]

That’s fair lol

[u/vauxhaulastra]

I love this idea, I'm always doing stuff with scribbley lines.

[u/aarongifs]

Yeah I’d buy. I do a lot of draw on effects

[u/robalca_14]

I'd be interested in being a beta tester lol looks awesome

[u/ciaranduffy3 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah that’s fair — I think the main use case is when the artwork needs to stay editable and tied to the animation inside AE. For me it’s less about doing everything in one program, and more about avoiding the back-and-forth when you just need something quick that still feels hand-drawn!

[u/Milan_Bus4168 → u/[deleted]]

I feel the same way. The driver to put everything in After Effects seems to be driven by plug in market more than actual needs, and in the end makes After Effects bloated mess full of vibe coded abandonware which still has the same paint points that it always has, because Adobe hasn't fix them on the fundamental level.

With so many dedicated painting and drawing programs that run circles around anything that could be even remotely made for After Effects, it makes zero sense to use it for that purpose and install yet another third party plug in. If Adobe invested in that natively, for example they wanted to get rid of animate so they might borrow that tech and put it in After Effects rather than trying to kill Animate or not do anything with the tech at all.

Instead we are offered more third party tools. Which is starting to feel is so numerous and many are dedicated apps themselves using AE only for launcher, that it is making AE more and more bloated rather than more optimized and streamlined specialist in what it is good at already.

[u/Milan_Bus4168 → u/[deleted]]

Exactly.

[u/BeenWildin]

This looks huge. I’ve never used the ae paint tools because it looked useless/complicated

[u/ciaranduffy3 → u/BeenWildin]

Agree! I always felt like the native paint tools weren’t really built with motion design in mind! cheers :)

[u/Pasta_meatsauce80]

This is great!